IAB UK recently published the latest edition of its IAB Compass: digital out-of-home report, forecasting that digital out-of-home (DOOH) will account for 76% of UK out-of-home (OOH) advertising spend by 2031.
The report reveals that investment in DOOH reached a record £964 million in 2025, accounting for 67% of total UK OOH advertising spend, up from just 32% in 2015. Continued investment in digital inventory, alongside growing adoption of programmatic buying, is expected to accelerate this growth over the next five years.
The report also explores how advertisers are increasingly planning DOOH as part of integrated omnichannel campaigns, using the medium alongside channels including mobile, social, online video and search to create more connected customer journeys.
New Digital Age spoke with Elizabeth Lane, Head of Insight at IAB UK, to find out more…
What motivated the commissioning of this research? Is it a regular report?
The report is part of a suite of studies we’ve produced over the last five years called Compass. The idea is that we look at emerging areas of digital advertising and then dive into market trends, industry expert views and predictions about what the next 12 to 18 months are going to hold.
We produced a report on digital out of home three years ago, in 2023. At that point, programmatic was really nascent, and digital out-of-home was recovering from quite a shock from the pandemic. Fast forward three years and the landscape has changed a lot, so it was ripe for a refresh and a new report.
What, for you, are the headline findings from the new research?
The key takeaway for me is just how much the market has matured over the last few years.
We’re predicting that digital, as a proportion of all out of home, will reach 76% by 2031. That’s double what it was 10 years ago. Programmatic is on the rise too, and we think it will make up a quarter of the market in the next five years.
The report looks at several things that point towards growth: digital out of home has developed into a really sophisticated, full-funnel part of the digital mix, while the growth of programmatic has brought much more precise targeting capabilities and richer audience data. There’s also lots of creative innovation happening, alongside improvements in measurement.
Did any of the findings surprise you?
What surprised me most was comparing what we were focusing on in our 2023 report with what this new 2026 edition is saying.
In some areas, we were right on the money. We thought digital out of home would reach £1 billion in ad spend by 2027, and we’re almost there – effectively, we got there in 2025, when spend reached £964 million.
But in other ways, the conversation has changed completely. Back in 2023, we were talking to experts about how digital out-of-home’s value was in its high-reach, high-attention environment. That’s still true, but what experts talk about now is how dynamic and creative the programmatic element is.
Something else that surprised me, and which seems really obvious when you say it out loud, is how brand safe digital out-of-home is. Over the last few years, online safety has become so important to our conversations, and digital out of home screens are one of the safest environments in which you can advertise to consumers.
Are brands making the most of prDOOH’s capabilities, creatively and strategically?
I think it’s a mixed picture.
When we speak to IAB members about whether brands are fully leaning in, we hear that there is growing interest in including programmatic digital out-of-home in their multi-channel campaigns, which is really positive.
We’ve also seen other growing areas of the market combining forces with digital out of home. Retail media is one example: we’ve seen the Co-op launch a new out of home network, capitalising on the programmatic elements there.
But there’s still a lot more room to expand. Programmatic is growing, but it still only accounts for 9% of the overall out of home mix. That means there’s a huge amount of out of home spend that isn’t taking advantage of the speed, precision and creative innovation that programmatic affords.
There are huge opportunities for brands to do more in that space.
What, if anything, is holding prDOOH back from attracting higher levels of investment?
One of the key areas is awareness and education.
Our members who took part in the study, and those who work in digital out-of-home, talk about there being a lack of skills among brands and agencies. They aren’t necessarily able to be self-serve when it comes to programmatic digital out of home.
Secondly, there aren’t enough case studies that the industry can point towards to showcase programmatic’s capabilities and effectiveness. We know that when brands see companies like themselves using a new area of digital advertising and it being really effective, that can help them innovate, take risks and try new things.
Our Compass report highlights some of those case studies. There’s a particularly interesting example where BMW and iMedia used real-time data on a car’s age as it passed a billboard, with the creative adapting according to the likely stage of the consumer’s car ownership lifecycle.
We’re not sitting on an abundance of those sorts of case studies, though, and our members are really keen to work with brands and agencies to provide more examples of how and when programmatic can be used effectively.
Are we any closer to proving the amplification effect of prDOOH on the performance of other channels within an omnichannel campaign?
Yes, we are closer.
The advances in programmatic mean that digital out-of-home is more measurable than it used to be. You can test more dynamically, carry out real-time optimisation and add richer contextual data. We’re also hearing, particularly from agencies, that programmatic is starting to be adopted more into marketing mix modelling, which is another improvement.
But there is still lots more to be done more generally across digital advertising to make sure channels are fairly represented in marketing mix modelling.
When it comes to measuring programmatic digital out-of-home in isolation, some of the challenges are really part of the widespread and structural issues facing the whole industry. Think about fragmentation of data, a lack of standards and data not being shared across the ecosystem.
Those are some of the things we hear about within programmatic digital out of home, but they’re not isolated to that environment. It’s why the IAB is focusing, both in the UK and globally, on bringing all sides of the industry together to work out where we can make measurement improvements.
One of the recommendations in our Compass report is for media owners to think more about the evidence points in their data, so they can use that to showcase how effective programmatic digital out-of-home can be.
